In this uproarious year, it now is not outside the possibility that President Obama could lose this election.  One does not have to be an expert in these things to sense something is not plumb with things-as-usual.  I have been around journalistically and politically long enough to be confounded totally by what has happened in South Carolina.

For conventional thinkers, this is not the year to be conventional.  My thoughts have been all along that Obama was going to sweep over any of the Republican candidates.  Now I am not so sure.  Will Florida tell the tale?  Perhaps.  Watching Mitt Romney on television was looking at someone who, it turns out, is not as good as he thinks he is.  This business of running for President is not like directing a takeover of another company – running for President is not insider work.  Romney talked tonight as if he were talking to his staff instead of the country.  His spiel was canned and repetitive.  Newt Gingrich offers something new: New language, new energy, new anger – the stuff of which most elections are made and won.At the beginning of this year, I thought Gingrich would be the easiest person to beat in the general election.  Now I am not so sure.  My blood runs cold when I hear the experts on television report that their expert-friends in the White House and in the Obama Campaign are popping champagne bottles at the thought of Gingrich being nominated.  I have news for them: You and I have greatly underestimated Gingrich.  He belongs to the gangster club that Lee Attwater two political generations ago founded and whose current president is Karl Rove.  And yet in the national polls, this Romney is tied, essentially, with the President?  This Romney?  Does not make sense.  Now we know why: the roar of the crowd is real and Gingrich knows how to goad it into action.

You cannot lose two of the first three contests in the GOP and win the nomination, and believing how Romney wins it becomes more formidable.  As the primaries go, the western states are probably more Gingrich territory now than they were even from four years ago for McCain.  Think Arizona.  So if the South holds for Gingrich and the West adds to those wins, it is – amazingly, stupefyingly – possible that he could capture the nomination.

Florida is an opportunity for the HispanicLatino and mostly Cuban American vote to help stop the hate wing of the Republican Party, and they will do so, but not because they are so simpatico with other HispanicLatinos upset with the rhetoric the GOP has unleashed against their community.  Rather, HispanicLatinos, being the most conventional of all, will be uniformly in Romney’s corner.  In a year of unconventionality, HispanicLatinos will probably help Romney win but not by much, which is why the fight will continue to other parts of the country where an angry and anxious election awaits and is ready to respond to Gingrich.

We have seen Gingrich arise from absolutely nothing – his staff of experts abandoned him months ago and went to Rick Perry, for goodness’ sake!  If the Obama camp thinks they are going to roar to re-election if Gingrich is its opponent, it is mistaken.

Saturday January 21, 2012  8:20 CST

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